Hypotension, or low blood pressure, can be a harbinger of serious medical complications, and even mortality, for patients undergoing surgery and those acutely or critically ill patients receiving treatment in an intensive care unit (ICU). The dangers associated with the occurrence of hypotension in a patient are due both to the potential injury caused by the hypotension itself and to the many serious underlying medical disorders that the occurrence of hypotension may signify.
In and of itself, hypotension in surgical patients or critically ill patients is a serious medical condition. For example, in the operating room (OR) setting, hypotension during surgery is associated with increased mortality and organ injury. Even short durations of extreme hypotension during surgery are associated with acute kidney injury and myocardial injury. Among critically ill patients, in-hospital mortality may be nearly doubled for patients experiencing hypotension after emergency intubation. For surgical patients and seriously ill patients alike, hypotension, if not corrected, can impair organ perfusion, resulting in irreversible ischemic damage, neurological deficit, cardiomyopathy, and renal impairment.
In addition to posing serious risks to surgical patients and critically ill patients in its own right, hypotension can be a symptom of one or more other serious underlying medical conditions. Examples of underlying conditions for which hypotension may serve as an acute symptom include sepsis, myocardial infarction, cardiac arrhythmia, pulmonary embolism, hemorrhage, dehydration, anaphylaxis, acute reaction to medication, hypovolemia, insufficient cardiac output, and vasodilatory shock. Due to its association with such a variety of serious medical conditions, hypotension is relatively common, and is often seen as one of the first signs of patient deterioration in the OR and ICU. For instance, hypotension is seen in up to approximately thirty-three percent of surgeries overall, and up to eighty-five percent in high risk surgeries. Among ICU patients, hypotension occurs in from approximately twenty-four percent to approximately eighty-five percent of all patients, with the eighty-five percent occurrence being seen among critically ill patients.
Conventional patient monitoring for hypotension in the OR and ICU settings can include continuous or periodic blood pressure measurement. However, such monitoring, whether continuous or periodic, typically provides no more than a real-time assessment. As a result, hypotension in a surgical patient or critically ill patient is usually detected only after it begins to occur, so that remedial measures and interventions cannot be initiated until the patient has entered a hypotensive state. Although, as noted above, extreme hypotension can have potentially devastating medical consequences quite quickly, even relatively mild levels of hypotension can herald or precipitate cardiac arrest in patients with limited cardiac reserve.
In view of the frequency with which hypotension is observed to occur in the OR and ICU settings, and due to the serious and sometimes immediate medical consequences that can result when it does occurs, a solution enabling prediction of a future hypotension event, before its occurrence, is highly desirable.